Fast App Launching with GNOME Do

When your panel is littered with application shortcuts or you press Alt-F2 every few minutes to launch a new program, check out a better, faster way to launch your programs—GNOME Do.

Preferences

GNOME Do has a pretty shallow learning curve. The interface is easy to
grasp, so before too long, you will find it easy to launch programs
and interact with plugins and other features. Of course, to get to
these features, you first need to go the Preferences window. In the top
right-hand corner of the window, you will notice a small triangle. When
you click on it, you'll see a drop-down menu with About, Preferences
and Quit options. Choose Preferences.

The Preferences window is minimalist (Figure 4) and divides its settings
into three tabs. In the first tab, you can change basic settings, such as
whether GNOME Do starts at login, whether to show its notification
icon and what theme to use. The second tab lets you configure keyboard
bindings used with GNOME Do in case you want to change the defaults. The
final Plugins tab is probably the most interesting. GNOME Do ships with
a number of plugins, and additional third-party plugins
extend GNOME Do's functionality.

Figure 4. GNOME Do Preferences Window

Plugins

GNOME Do's plugins are what move this program beyond a replacement
for the Applications menu on your desktop into a blend between
a launcher, desktop search tool and central interface for other
desktop operations. Most of the plugins probably will be disabled by
default, so to get this extra functionality, you need to go into the
Preferences window and enable the particular plugin. Below, I highlight a
few particularly interesting plugins.

File Plugins

A few different plugins turn GNOME Do into a file browser
and search tool. The Files and Folders plugin indexes directories of
your choice (highlight the Files and Folders plugin in your Preferences
window, and then click Configure to set which folders it indexes). As
you type, GNOME Do lists files it finds within those directories
as results. You then can copy, delete, browse and perform a number of
other options on the files, as shown in Figure 3.

In addition to the Files and Folders plugin is the Locate Files
plugin. This plugin uses the GNU locate command, so instead of just
searching through directories you specify, you can type a keyword and then
select Locate Files in the actions pane. GNOME Do then returns the
list of results so you can act on them (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Locate Plugin Results

GNOME Tools

With a name like GNOME Do, you probably won't be surprised to know
that there are a number of plugins that extend into GNOME functions. The
GNOME Dictionary plugin provides a define action, so you can type a word,
choose define and get back a definition. The GNOME Screenshot plugin
adds a Take Screenshot result if you start to type that phrase. Then you
can configure screenshots of the entire desktop, a specific window
or even take screenshots after a timed delay. I used that particular
plugin quite a bit while writing this article.

The GNOME Terminal plugin extends the traditional Alt-F2 command window
in that you can not only run commands within the GNOME Terminal, you also can
select particular GNOME Terminal profiles you have created. Figure 6
shows the result when I type mutt into GNOME Do. The Open Profile action
represents my mutt GNOME Terminal profile.

Finally, the GNOME Session
Management plugin gives you the same functionality as the power button
at the top of the GNOME panel, so you can lock your screen, shut down,
reboot and hibernate your desktop.

Figure 6. GNOME Terminal Profile Action

Google Tools

A number of plugins can query Google services. The Gmail
Contacts plugin indexes your Gmail contact list and provides it as results
to queries so you then can select actions, such as e-mail. You also
can interface with your Google Calendar using the plugin of the same name and
search through and even create new events. The Google Calculator plugin
lets you perform the same calculations and conversions you can perform
on the Google Calculator site, only within GNOME Do. Finally, with the
Google Maps plugin, you can type in an address and select Map to submit
the location to Google Maps.

Kyle Rankin is a director of engineering operations in the San Francisco Bay Area, the author of a number of books including DevOps Troubleshooting and The Official Ubuntu Server Book, and is a columnist for Linux Journal.

I would like to launch my own programs using Gnome-Do but so far could not make it happen.
Say I write a program "~/projects/hello.c" and compile it into "~/projects/a.out".
To test it I open a terminal and type "~/projects/a.out" at the prompt. Everything works as expected.

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